Library of Discards is an ongoing project that had its genesis in weekly trips to my local
public library. There, I chose one book a week from the free cart and brought it home to
catalogue. The cataloguing method I used was my own: I synthesized the content of the
book and recorded its bibliographic record, but more important, I documented each
book’s artifactual content. That is, my interest in the books was with the marks of the
provenance and use. These usage markers normally consist of signatures of ownership,
marginalia, worn parts of the book, and the like. While I have recorded damage to books
done in mostly unintentional ways, I have not had to catalogue until now the particularly
vicious and in some respects highly puzzling vandalism that I encountered in The Pleasure
Principle. The book now becomes a part of my Library of Discards, a permanent
monument to the power of the printed word and its endurance through the most horrifying
of trials.
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